Engineering Progression Framework

Background 💭

The engineering progression framework is a tool that helps engineers and managers:

make development and career plans

talk about what we’re looking for from engineers in a consistent way

set a fair level of compensation.

Read this blog post to find out more about what it’s for and why we’ve made it public.

The framework is a compass, not a GPS.

It's meant to be helpful. It's not meant to be a rating system for humans, free from edge cases.

How it works 🤔

The framework covers all the things we’re looking for from engineers at Monzo. We’re interested in these five elements:

Mastery - Your Monzo knowledge and technical capability

Impact - The size, scope and value of what you deliver

Influence - How you change the world around you for the better

Comms & Feedback - How you interact with others

Leadership - How people around you become better and more impactful

We sort them into six levels, and we try to give specific examples of behaviours we expect for each. Each of those levels has a fairly wide salary range associated with it, and within each level you can progress in sub-levels, labelled A–E. So even if you’re at level 3 for a couple of years, you’ll still be able to see that you’re moving forward. Basically, the more behaviours you show from your level, the more you’ll progress.

Your manager will work with you on this. None of it will happen mysteriously behind closed doors. You’ll agree what level of progression you’re going for and what you need to improve on with your manager. It should be clear how you’re doing relative to that at all times.

Things to keep in mind 💡

There are many different ways to progress and be valuable to Monzo as you grow, including deep technical knowledge and ability, technical leadership and people management. All are equally valuable paths in Monzo's engineering team.

The framework represents a career’s worth of progression, people shouldn’t expect to fly up it in 18 months!

Engineering progression isn’t an exact science and there will always be some ambiguity.

This isn’t a checklist – it’s possible to progress up a level without showing all the behaviours in that level.

There will be levels on top (eg ‘Inventor of Android’ or ‘Author of Go’), but we won’t add them until we need them.

You can find some more information in these links. If that doesn't answer most of your questions, please ask your manager.

Share your feedback 📣

This is only the first version of our framework and we really want your feedback.

We're particularly keen to add as many examples to the behaviours as possible, to further clarify them.

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